It's difficult to do real FP in Python, though. Its lambda operator is crippled (one statement only), and it doesn't have tail call elimination* . Still, you can try out some functional ideas in it pretty easily, such as the map and filter functions.

* What tail-call elimination basically means is that when you call a function, but aren't waiting on its result as part of an expression at the current level (the difference between "1 + f(x, totalCount)" and "f(x, 1 + totalCount)", the language realizes that it doesn't need to keep a placeholder for doing stuff when that level is done on the stack. Therefore, calling a function in that manner can be used for (potentially infinite) looping without just piling more and more on the stack and eventually filling it up. If you try doing that in python, it will eventually blow the stack:

  def houseOfCards(x):
      if x == 0:
          return "done"
      else:
          return houseOfCards(x - 1)

  >>> houseOfCards(10)
  'done'
  >>> houseOfCards(100)
  'done'
  >>> houseOfCards(1000)
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    File "/tmp/py21945wPg", line 5, in houseOfCards
  RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded